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What We Are Reading
Ernesto Ramirez
May 25, 2014
What We Are Reading Newsletter from May 25, 2014
What We Are Reading Newsletter from May 25, 2014
Today’s post comes to us from Kitty Ireland, who co-led the Telling Stories With Data breakout session at the 2014 Quantified Self Europe Conference. You’re invited to read her description of the session and then join the discussion on the QS Forum. You can also view and download their session presentation here. Telling Stories With Data by Kitty…
On May 10-11th we hosted the 2014 Quantified Self Europe Conference. Hundreds of self-trackers, toolmakers, scientists, and enthusiasts came together to share, learn, and discuss how we can create personal meaning through personal data. The conference featured over 100 different sessions that included Show&Tell talks, Breakouts on a wide variety of topics, and inspirational and…
A core piece of our conferences are the numerous breakout sessions that cover a wide variety of topics from social sciences to hands-on workshops on privacy and data security. These sessions are facilitated by conference attendees and they put in a lot of work to engage their groups in meaningful discussion. This year, starting with…
Rob Shields has been wearing a phone around his neck since 2012 in order to take one photo per minute. This persistent lifelogging has come with some technological and social hurdles. At the 2013 Quantified Self Global Conference, Rob explained some of the issues he’s been running into as he nears 300,000 photos. He also…
What We Are Reading Newsletter from May 18, 2014
Arlene Ducao came to QS from using the WiFit to track personal metrics. As a researcher and maker she started to apply the lessons from self-tracking to another one of her interests, cycling. As a frequent bike ride she started with simple customizations like adding LEDs to her helmet. When consumer EEG devices came on…
The 2014 Quantified Self Europe conference is a “carefully curated unconference”. This means that all of our sessions come from the attendees. We are happy to announce that we have more than 100 separate talks and discussions planned. More than 30% of the attendees will be presenting in some way. This conference is for the…
When we organized our very first QS Conference in 2011 we were bombarded with so many proposals from people who wanted to share their projects and self-tracking experiences we decided to add talks to our extended lunch breaks. The lunchtime Ignite session was born and now we can’t imagine a conference without them. Below is…
What did you do? How did you do it? What did you learn? These are the three questions we ask people to answer in their Quantified Self Show&Tell talks. We’re thrilled to see the Show&Tell proposals coming in from registrants for the 2014 Quantified Self Europe Conference, with topics ranging from blood glucose tracking to novel uses…
We organize our QS conferences backwards: First the registrants, then the program. We like to keep things open to the last minute so we can get a sense of what everybody is working on and thinking about before making the final lineup. But eventually the printer’s deadline looms, and we have to say: this is…
My friend Seth Roberts, pioneering self-experimenter and personal scientist, died last Saturday. Seth’s sister Amy, made the announcement yesterday on his blog. The news was unexpected and very sad. A few things Seth taught me: Doing lots of experiments keeps you supplied with new ideas. With sensitive and reliable measurements, tiny experimental effects can yield surprising…
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Apr 27, 2014
We’re fascinated by self-tracking projects that extend over long periods of time, and at the upcoming QS Europe conference we’re going to hear from two artists who have been making work out of novel personal data extending back for years. Since 2004, Alberto Frigo has taken a photograph of every object he holds in his dominant…
We are not alone. No, there haven’t been any extraterrestrial sightings lately, but there have been many advances in understanding the organisms that make up the ecosystem of ourselves. Did you know that you are supporting almost 10 times more bacterial cells than human cells? These bacterial collaborators have a profound affect on health and wellbeing. Jessica…
Last June, the Pew Internet Research Project released a report entitled, Family Caregivers are Wired for Health. The authors – Susannah Fox, Maeve Duggan and Kristen Purcell – found that 40% of Americans are caring for an adult or child with significant health issues. Of special interest to us: “When controlling for age, income, education, ethnicity, and good…
We’ve learned a lot from the diabetics in our community, such as Jana Beck’s lessons from 100,000+ blood glucose readings, and Doug Kanter’s narrative visualizations of a year of his diabetes data. At the upcoming QS Europe Conference on May 10th and 11th in Amsterdam, we’re going to hear the interesting story of a non-diabetic who began tracking his fasting glucose…
Like many of us, Michael Cohn had a hard time “rationally regulating” his behavior. Even as a psychology researcher at UCSF, he was falling victim to procrastination and time wasting. He started exploring “irrationally regulating” his behavior by stating personal commitment contacts then using self-tracking via spreadsheets to understand how he spends his time and…
Rosane Oliveiria is a researcher and scholar that focuses on integrative medicine, genomics, and nutrition. She’s also an identical twin. In 2012 she was struck by the different patterns of weight fluctuations that she and her sister, Renata, had been experiencing. Using historical data and medical records she was able to go back in time…
Maria Benet began tracking her activity a few years ago as a way to lose weight and take control of her health. What started with a simple pedometer and a few custom Access databases has morphed into a multi-year tracking project that includes news apps and tools. Her progress and data has even spurred her…